


Can't Get You Out Of My Head

by AndreaLyn



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mind Reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 05:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skye and Fitz touch something that allows them to read each other's mind and Skye is getting pretty worn out with how often Fitz thinks about Simmons without even realizing it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Get You Out Of My Head

“Fitz,” Simmons sighs despondently as she stares at the residual energy sparking around both him and Skye. “What have we talked about?”

“I’m not usually the one touching the strange artifacts!” Fitz protests, staring accusingly in Skye’s direction. He’s only moments away from wild, mad, intense gesticulations and oh look, there go his fingers with the pointing and the accusing and the duly right blame. “She! She’s the one who convinced me to take a look, said it had some wild mystical energy swirling around it.”

“It _does_ ,” Skye protests. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it!”

Simmons has begun her thorough checks of them, scanning them up and down without any precaution for her own safety. Fitz opens his mouth to say something about it, but thinks better. She knows what she’s doing and won’t take kindly to his interrupting her process. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches Skye giving him a considering look and Fitz puffs out his chest at bit, proud to be noticed. He has been working out lately and he thinks those ten push-ups a day are really starting to show...

“Oh!” Simmons exclaims.

“What? What is it? Am I dying?” Fitz desperately demands.

“No, no, it’s only that there was a spike in brain activity,” Simmons says, staring at her screen with rapt delight.

“Yes, Jemma, ha ha,” Fitz deadpans, “Another joke about being able to hear me thinking out loud.” 

She rolls her eyes. “No, Fitz, you idiot, it was a synchronized spike in brain activity in _both_ of you at the exact same time,” she marvels, turning her scanner on Skye. “Maybe I should put you both under with a sedative and send a few pulses through to see what sort of reactions you’re capable of...”

Fitz knows that tone. That’s how Simmons sounds _right_ before she goes over that cliff into mad scientist territory and suddenly Fitz’s brain is on display on a shelf in her lab and she’s talking to herself because she’s gone mad without his stabilizing influence, thank you very much. Skye is giving him that look again and Simmons looks as fascinated as ever.

“What?” Fitz spits out, finally.

“Dude, you’re kind of loud,” Skye points out, arching her brows. “Like, I get that you like to think at level ten, but maybe notch it down to level three while I’m in there?”

“You can hear his thoughts?” Simmons asks, her words practically vibrating with giddy delight. “Fitz! Fitz, she can _hear your thoughts_!”

Fitz stares at Skye with despondent horror, letting his mind catch up. “I don’t hear you,” he says, shaking his head as he thinks about what horrible, terrifying things he’s thought of and what outfits he might have mentally placed Skye in during the last half hour. He frowns, focuses slightly on a tinny little thread underneath the pile of other thoughts. “Oh wait, hold on a tic. Wait, wait, wait,” he says, closing one eye and focusing it. “Oh, that’s _you_! I could barely hear you thinking, it must not have been very important!”

Skye and Simmons are both looking at him now with the very same look of disappointed irritation.

Okay, then, no mistaking Skye’s lewd slurs of profanity broadcasted straight into his brain that time. Fitz’s good sense of alarm kicks in and he offers the kindest smile he can. “It’s not a comment on your prowess in thinking, Skye,” he promises. “It’s only that it’s buried under several layers of ongoing chatter relating to physics, engineering, and all other sorts of thoughts.”

And there’s that _look_ again, the one he can’t decipher, the one that he thinks might be calling ‘bullshit’ on some unknown lie he’s communicating.

He doesn’t have time to worry about that now.

“Do you need any help with the scans?” he asks of Simmons, who’s already walking away.

“No! Go rest up!” she calls back. “I’ll get the both of you when I have something!”

* * *

‘When I have something’ apparently doesn’t mean that she’s in a rush to release that information to Fitz and Skye. The 0-8-4 has been taken onto the bus and May and Coulson are busy ensuring it’s not going to blow them out of the sky, Ward’s currently decompressing or doing a thousand pull-ups or glaring icily into a baby’s eyes or whatever he does to keep ready, Simmons is in the lab and Fitz and Skye have resorted to Monopoly.

And Fitz is losing. Badly.

He hits his head steadily against the table in front of him, wanting Skye’s thoughts out of his head because the steady way she thinks about computer code, Ward without a shirt, and brownies is actually fairly alarming. Besides that, he’s not entirely sure what she’s hearing from him, so it’s actually a bit terrifying.

“I could tell you, you know,” Skye says, weighing the dice in her hand as she studies the board. “If you want to know what I hear you thinking about.”

“We don’t have to do this,” Fitz promises, already feeling frightened that she’s not going to listen to him.

Skye smirks like she never considered giving him an option. “It’s kind of cute, actually,” she says, rolling the dice. “I mean, I knew the two of you were close, but I had no idea you thought about her that much.” She stares despondently at the two she’s rolled before leaning her forearms on the table and getting in his personal space. “Like, you think about her all the time,” she says. “And it’s really adorable. I mean, yeah, she’s got a cute butt, but I don’t think I ever considered it geometrically the way you did.”

Fitz sputters, not sure he wants to dignify any of this malarkey with a response. It’s utterly ridiculous, it’s inane, and it’s... “...not true,” he sputters. “I don’t think about...which her, now?”

Skye leans back in her chair, scoffing incredulously. “Are you for real? Is this like, you trying to screw with my head because I can hear your thoughts and you’re mad at me? You and _Simmons_! Oh my god, literally, before we got back on the plane you were thinking about the time she jumped and there was waves of guilt and before that, you kept inching closer to her in the car and wondering if she noticed and before _that_ , there was a disgusting fantasy involving a labcoat and nothing else...” Skye cringes, like she wants it all to end and Fitz is definitely on board with that.

Fitz takes a deep breath and realises that perhaps subconscious streams of thought might be communicated, which does make sense given that Skye wouldn’t consciously keep humming The Girl From Ipanema on purpose. Would she?

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Fitz protests under his breath, watching Skye take her turn and buying up the Electric Company as a result.

“It could mean something,” Skye says. “If you want it to.”

Fitz does not want to talk about that.

It’s a shame his mind wants to think about it.

He can feel it coming practically like a tidal wave as subconscious thoughts unearth top-level ones like lightening the load of the night-night gun and developing a way of improving the Dwarves and what he’d like for dinner and how very much he’d really like a monkey. Instead, the deeper thoughts come back and he thinks about the way she smiles when she’s discovered something new and reverent and the private, but perfect way she looks at him like he’s the only other person in the world.

And the way she smells, that hint of antiseptic, a bit of hand sanitizer (lemon spritzed), and fresh laundry detergent; he thinks of that. Actually, he gets a bit breathless when he thinks about how much she challenges him to think better and brighter and how terrified she makes him because after the Chitauri virus, he’s so keenly aware of the fact that they’re not invincible in the field.

“Okay, okay,” Skye protests. “I know I said to think about it, but not that much. You think too much more about what she might look like out of a decontamination shower and you might turn a girl,” she warns. 

Well, that’s just not fair, thinks Fitz.

“Ew,” Skye protests. “Ew and weird and ew,” she says, because Fitz’s mind has, of course, jumped straight to putting Skye in that shower with Simmons. “Please don’t have sex fantasies about me while I’m in your brain or I’m gonna make you do some skeevy things with Coulson up here,” she warns, tapping her temple.

“Evil,” Fitz hisses.

Now that she’s brought it up, it’s like the pink elephant in the corner of the room and every time he makes a concerted effort not to think about Jemma, he can feel it creeping in and being worse than before. Grimacing, Fitz resolves his thoughts to thinking about the Monopoly game at hand and not what Jemma’s hands are doing right now or when she went from _Simmons_ to _Jemma_ in his head.

Skye groans. “Okay, this is my fault. I brought it up, so let’s go,” she encourages. “Let’s have it. What the hell, man,” she demands. “You were slobbering like a sad puppy trying to get into my bra a couple weeks ago and you threw Simmons under the bus, but suddenly she almost dies and now I get a peek inside your brain and it’s all Simmons, all the time. And hey, I totally think you two are the cutest thing to happen since a box of puppies, but _get there_ , go there, do something,” she says. “I might not have a direct link to her brain, but I know when a girl is into a guy and Fitz, she’s been trying so hard not to let it show that she likes you because you,” Skye says, leaning over to smack the back of his head, “idiot! You were practically drooling over me. Why do you think she’s trying to put a brave face on? So if you’re having thoughts of what she’d look like waking up between your sheets and those thoughts about what her kiss would be like somewhere other than your cheek? Fitz, you seriously have got to decide whether you’re going to man up or just let it keep consuming you until it’s not just a running thought.”

“We’re beside each other all the time,” he says, fear seizing him down to the last bit. “If things go wrong, if she doesn’t want me, this is over, Skye. All of this,” he says, keenly aware of how much there is to lose.

She gives him a sad smile. “And what if it goes right?”

What if it does? What if them together is the perfect experiment, all the values adding up to prove the hypothesis exact. What happens when you merge Fitz and Simmons together to live up to what the rest of the world already knows about them; they’re inseparable down to their names, their bodies, their brains. He’s so scared and he’s so eager and anxious and his fingers are buzzing with anxious anticipation and god, he wants to touch her and find out, but he doesn’t, no he doesn’t.

“Skye, I can’t,” Fitz ekes out. 

“Coward,” Skye accuses quietly, but there’s no malice in it.

They play the game in silence for hours after that. Eventually, Fitz bankrupts Skye, but there’s no cheer. The mood remains sombre as thoughts of fear and failure consume him and Skye, given the extension of his thoughts into her mind. They part without a goodbye and Fitz goes back to his bunk where he hugs his pillow and determinedly does not think about the fact that it carries lingering traces of Jemma’s scent given how often she’s in here.

After so many potential near-death scenarios, somehow this is the scariest situation Fitz has ever been in.

* * *

“And...” Jemma says excitedly, poking Fitz in the neck with the negating solution she’s developed to create a blockage between his brain and Skye’s. “There! Your thoughts are officially your own again,” she says proudly, tucking away the delivery mechanism back in its’ compartment. “How do you feel?” she asks, hands tucked in the pockets of her labcoat.

Fitz is intimately glad that Skye no longer has direct access to his brain because he’s having some horrid, awful, terrible, wonderful, sexy, impure thoughts about the labcoat fantasy again; the one where Jemma shows up at his bedroom wearing nothing but a labcoat, goggles atop her head, and carrying a perpetual motion device that can produce viral antidotes as it works. He grips his thigh tightly as he forces a smile on his face and tries to steer his mind away from those thoughts. 

“Better,” Fitz says. “How’d Skye take it?”

“She said she was beyond grateful to be out of your head,” Jemma says, rolling her eyes. “I don’t know what would be so bad about being in your head. Actually, I imagine it might save us a good deal of time,” she says. “Shame it wasn’t you and me connected like that,” she says distractedly, typing her analysis of the results into the computer.

Fitz is ninety percent sure that there’s no after-effect of the antidote that’s making his tongue looser than usual, but he does know he wouldn’t normally blurt out what he does: “We’re already connected.”

“Oh, Fitz, I know,” Jemma says. “But imagine if I was in your brain,” she says, staring at him with the kind of awe some people reserve for seeing universes and the Grand Canyon for the first time. That itch is back in his fingertips and Fitz rocks back and forth on his heels as he feels like he might burst with this feeling. “I can’t think of anywhere better,” she says, reaching across the table to slide her fingers delicately and hesitantly over his.

Oh god, he’s going to explode if he doesn’t do something.

He starts with a few steps around the table and winds his fingers up the side of her labcoat, tugging just lightly enough to get her attention. His is focused downwards, watching his fingers slide up to the lapels of the white coat. “You have to understand before I go on that I’m more terrified than I’ve ever been in my life and you’ve dragged me into more than enough terrifying situations in the field for you to know that’s saying something,” he says. “But if this goes wrong, it doesn’t just go wrong, it goes nuclear,” he goes on, daring a flickering glance at her eyes to see if she’s beginning to catch on.

She’s never needed to read his mind to be able to innately know exactly what he means at every moment.

“Fitz?”

He shakes his head, swallowing hard.

“Leo,” she says, firmly, weighing the syllables like she’s debating exactly how she needs to say it. She nods, like she’s pleased with it and smiles so brilliantly at him that she practically radiates. Something seems to bleed away from her, as if she’s been tense about this a very long time. “I always did think you and I would have to go out in a big blaze of glory, even if we weren’t...well, together.”

“I’m sure there’s a device out there to help us do it,” he jokes.

She clasps his hand in hers, a hopeful smile on her lips. “We don’t need anything else,” she says. “We’ve got each other.” She runs her thumb in slow circles over his palm and takes a step closer into his space, close enough for him to slide his hand to the small of her back and press his lips tentatively against the corner of hers. He brushes a kiss there, eases to her jaw to explore the pale skin there while he bolsters his courage. 

“Oh, Fitz,” Jemma laughs fondly and presses two fingers on his chin to turn him three inches to the right – spot on to where he can kiss her right on the lips. He could live right here in the space between them, stealing daring little kisses and exhaustingly perfect longer ones as his fingers undo the tuck of her shirt and slip in against her warmth.

They stay like this for longer than he can reckon and when he can think, he doesn’t.

He actively doesn’t think about what could go wrong or what’s so very terrible about taking a risk and that might be more than he could ever expect. She’s in his arms and it feels absolutely right and he regrets that it took Jemma nearly jumping out of a plane to get him here, but at least they’ve made it.

“What does Skye think about?” Jemma asks, later, when they’re curled up together on the couch sharing a bag of chips (her legs draped over his lap and her cheek on his shoulder) while a history documentary about Vesuvius plays in the background. “Is it tawdry? Do I need to be over fifteen to know?”

“There were a few dirty fantasies about Ward in there,” Fitz says, his mouth full. “One of you, too! You were _naughty_ ,” he accuses, a playful grin on his lips.

She shoves him without much feeling. “And you? What must poor Skye think of me?”

“I promise, I did my best,” he protests. “Besides, it’s really only ever the one reoccurring one.”

“Oh?”

“It’s,” he starts, blushing furiously, “got a labcoat involved.”

“Oh,” Jemma says again, this time with far more interest. Her hair is out of the ponytail and falls in waves around her face. She looks like she’s considering something, which is both terrifying and terribly promising. “I’ll have to think about that one. Your birthday is coming up,” she says, patting him once on the thigh. “Come on! I’m hungry and you’ve eaten all the chips. There must be something more in the kitchen.”

It’s the same as ever and it’s not.

They’re beside each other, but it’s so much more and if it falls apart, then Fitz plans on taking Simmons out with him because they don’t do anything that isn’t together. So maybe they’ll have to work on making sure they can keep this together.

They’ve handled much worse.

How hard could forever be?


End file.
